Birds in Row
Gris Klein

Yves Klein spent a lifetime searching for the ideal color to find his personal ultimate horizon and he succeeded only through blue. What would one day become the famous International Klein Blue, the only shade that to his eye could transcend space and time, sky and earth. He searched for that blue in forms and meanings for weeks, months, years. And when he found it in a kaleidoscopic mosaic of sensations and emotions, the needle of his artistic and existential scale positioned itself in perfect balance.

It draws a melancholic smile then to see how the Birds In Row use the reference to the French painter to turn it into a Gris, the gray, and garnish it as the title of their third full-length release in over -by now- 10 years of career. A “Gris Klein” that appears and takes shape in the shout of the noise cacophony of “Trompe L'Oeil” with a dizzying switch, from the illusion of vulnerability echoing Emo Midwest in the first two minutes, to the exacerbated jugulars that cry out alarmed “But here Klein Blue just turned to Grey”.

Since the broken minivans of “Cottbus”, the journey of the Birds In Row has been a tortuous one that -moreover- spanned a decade full of socio-cultural transformations that have always provided a blank slate to fill their post-hardcore chromatic universe with a neurotic heart that marries certain screamo references, to the more intimate and expanded openings that blend well with the autumnal hues accompanying this release. All anchored to a DIY mentality never in the background.
With the abrasiveness of “You, Me & The Violence” they investigated how violence was permeated in daily life, the tumultuous “Personal War” transported it into an introspective dimension, while “We Already Lost the World” was the manifesto of a world now on the verge of collapse. An album released in 2018 and almost prophetic of what would later happen in 2020 with the pandemic and lockdown exacerbating both psychological and sociological dynamics. A period -not coincidentally- during which this “Gris Klein” was conceived and composed. Yet here the perspective of Birds In Row seems to have shifted, and the main clue is provided by the electric “Nympheas”: “No wonder why you feel so fucked up sometimes. You’re chasing bright colors over dirty blues.”

If “Fossils” closed “We Already Lost The World” with a barren chant in an apocalyptic desert where all hopes seemed to have evaporated, “Gris Klein” instead resembles more a shock wave that invites one to react to the numbness of what is experienced firsthand, to ultimately find those fateful bright colors: shades that spread like intertwined veins and articulated throughout the album's duration. And the artistic theme is not just an allegory used by Bart, Quentin, and Joris, but a main axis that radiates the album with an ever more crystalline, layered and chameleonic flow. We wouldn't use the word avant-garde, but here the French go well beyond their coordinates, diving into the deepest darkness. And in this, the granite passage of “Noah” comes across as a chilling warning “And they'll take us all where oxygen runs dry, and gold won't buy room for any of us.”

The claustrophobic, yet airy regrets of “Water Wings.” The oppression and abandonment of the burning post-punk of “Confettis.” The isolation of the “Cathedrals” in the dustiest void. The Birds In Row hide none of the disaster that exists around us -“reality is a fraud” opens the fierce apnea of “Daltonians”- but somehow, with those few strengths, they survive. They tear themselves apart and cling in the roaring work of changing vocal registers, in the strokes of an over-revving bass and a drum always tonic and reactive, ready to change scenarios in a nanosecond along with the tireless guitar work, which knows both how to attack and show itself fragile as never before, and that's how the real picture of “Gris Klein” is constructed. A picture where a sense of always pulsing urgency can be felt.

What is shaped by Birds In Row has the meticulous and painstaking care of amanuenses, where each track flows into another, for a narrative coherence that brings us to the end of the journey without any sag. Resisting like a statuesque and industrial “Rodin”- which must avoid being chipped by debris that chip promises already difficult to keep-, or through the lights and shadows of the decadent grays of “Grisaille” in a short circuit of escape and flight with no ultimate purpose:“We try to understand who we are. It feels like we wanna change the weather from rainy to stupid grey.”

“Gris Klein” resonates like a crystal dome that drops a copious ash of cigarettes from the sky that submerges everything, that dims the colors as if it were a chilly winter “Winter, Yet,” but in the end there, under that dome, it's all of us dancing, heedlessly of the dead ends and withered flowers. We do not yield. We react. Together. And this is the poetic and choral message of “Secession” for an album that can already be counted as yet another pearl of a band that needs no introduction anymore: “We dance. We dance. On the soundtrack of a life that leaves a bitter taste. Wandering around a blizzard, a coughing lighter in hand, hoping for an exit sign to shine anywhere.”

Could it be then that Gris Klein is the color of this generation? A quest that the Birds In Row wanted to undertake, confront, explore and shout to all of us to remind us who we are and who we want to be, to navigate towards safer harbors: the storm and surge will be there, but if we avoid sinking, the final destination may be -instead- our Klein Blue.